Recently, Facebook accordion friends ( your editor included) discovered a very gifted accordionist/composer…Cathie Travers from Australia.
Comments on the above video:
Cathie Travers said, “This composition is the second in a series of tunes I’m writing for a neat bunch of people – players in the USA & Canada. This one is dedicated to David Magliozzi. A very small compositional ‘plan’ was to feature the 4th and 13th – to reflect the numbers of Dave’s initials in the alphabet. So both those intervals are sharpened in one of the sections over the ‘D’ bass pedal groove thingy….makes the chord selection a little more juicy and out there – but only for a few bars. I like the flavor of the sharp 13 :-).”
Who is Cathie Travers? Her favorite quotation on her Facebook page: “If you can’t be a shining example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning!” Listen to Cathie’s sensitive compositions/performances. You will immediately know that she is a shining example to accordionists and musicians everywhere showing that dedicated practice, talent, and personality yields success as a musician and a person.
Cathie Travers is a composer/ performer from Australia, and holds a Bachelor of Music (hons) from the University of Western-Australia. She has worked for 36 years in a whole range of music genres. During the 1970’s she was a singer-guitarist, and then keyboard-player in rock bands [strictly analog at that time]. From 1980 Cathie worked as a classical pianist, and specialized in avant-garde repertoire including the use of digital technologies (late ’80-’90), and for the last 10 years as an accordionist in primarily gypsy/tango and other more folkloric settings. As well as writing and performing in concert settings, she has also worked quite extensively with dance and theatre companies.
As a composer, performer and arranger Cathie Travers has received many awards and commissions, which allowed her to explore music, theatre, and dance from many ethnicities all around the world. Her creative journey all started when her Opus 1 “In search of the gods” was awarded a National Youth Composition prize by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 1975.
Over the years she has worked with many artists and several dance-theatre companies from all around the world, such as the WA Ballet Company, the Black Swan theatre, El Quattro, Luciano Pavarotti,…Diverse, passionate, groundbreaking, eclectic, Cathie Travers’ musical journey has taken her across the spectrum of contemporary music, roaming from rock to classical, from the avant garde to the Tango, from esoteric electronica to electro-acoustic, jazz, gypsy and folk, with many other stops, ethnicities and adventures along the way.
Travers’ work has been featured in major arts and music festivals across Australia – Sydney (Festival and Mardi Gras), Perth, Melbourne, Hobart, Canberra, Adelaide and Fairbridge – and in concerts around the world: Canada, USA, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan. Her compositions have been included in many Australian and international TV and radio broadcasts, while choreographers and film-makers have often incorporated her concert pieces into their dance works and films.
She has performed with and composed for many Australian orchestras and concert artists, appeared as a session player on albums ranging from the avant-garde classical scene, through Latin-jazz to Celtic-influenced folk, composed for and performed live with dance-theatre companies, been Musical Director for many music-theatre productions, and now leads the Gypsy-tango quartet, Saggezza.
Cathie will perform/collaborate with a new orchestra in Perth in February 2013. Later in 2013, they will launch a small chamber orchestra. Cathie said, “I’ll be playing in the first launch concert and we’re working on another project together too – which we’re hoping we’ll be able to do in a planetarium theatre – with visual displays.” Her gypsy and tango music quartet called Saggezza will perform in 2013 at the Centenerary celebrations of her alma mater, The University of Western Australia.
Her university commissioned her to compose a new work which she recorded a few months ago for accordion and live electronics using similar principles to two pieces on her You Tube channel “Aerial Ballet 2” and “Elegy”. Her new composition “Procession” is bigger and more elaborate than either of those two works and is especially written for her Pigini Super King, making use of many of the different registrations. The recording is included on a CD which the Vice Chancellor of the university will be using as a gift presentation to visitors etc throughout 2013.
Cathie has formed a new trio consisting of guitar, violin, and accordion playing repertoire from France… the gypsy-jazz manouche style, plus some of Cathie’s originals. Cathie said, “I’m an ex-classical musician who has fallen deeply and madly in love with the accordion. Prior to studying at university and becoming a classical musician I had been a singer/guitarist and keyboard player in folk and rock bands around Perth. Now as an accordionist I’ve returned to the non-classical forms of music and I am enjoying myself so very much.”
Cathie is looking forward to her trip to the USA in August 2013.
For further information: accordion@westnet.com.au
